A Free Online Materials and Waste Exchange
The Ohio Materials Marketplace aims to create a closed-loop, collaborative network of businesses, organizations, and entrepreneurs where one organization’s hard-to-recycle wastes and by-products become another organization’s raw material. In addition to diverting waste from landfills, these recovery activities will generate significant cost savings, energy savings, and create new jobs and business opportunities.
The Ohio Materials Marketplace is hosted on the award-winning Materials Marketplace software platform from the U.S. Business Council for Sustainable Development. This online tool enables participating companies and project staff to easily post available or wanted materials, identify reuse opportunities, and exchange underutilized materials. Hundreds of large and small companies, academic institutions, non-profits, and entrepreneurs are using the Materials Marketplace around the world.
In a circular economy, all products and by-products recirculate back productively into the economy. One critical component of a circular economy is business-to-business materials reuse; matching wastes and under-valued resources across industries to find viable reuse options that retain and add value to materials above and beyond traditional waste disposal and recycling solutions. The result? A continuously evolving redesign of systems to establish higher value circular flows of materials.
The Ohio Environmental Protection Agency (Ohio EPA) manages the Ohio Materials Marketplace with support from the US Business Council for Sustainable Development.
Get more information or join today ohio.materialsmarketplace.org
Here are a few marketplace highlights:
- The Ohio Materials Marketplace added 15 new members in the months of December and January;
- 1013 individual members are now in the marketplace;
- 24 material listings were created and/or updated;
- Over 3.7 million pounds diverted from the landfill with over $222,000 in savings to members.
Economic development in the reuse and remanufacturing sector is a huge opportunity for Ohio businesses. The Ohio Materials Marketplace provides entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs with detailed information about materials available in the region.
- Globally, the transition to a circular economy is a trillion-dollar business opportunity, with the potential to create 100,000 new jobs by 2019. (Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2014).
- Economic impact studies from other U.S. municipalities make a strong business case for emerging reuse and recycling businesses.
- The Materials Marketplace – which received the 2015 Gold Excellence Award from the International Economic Development Council – helps bring these circular economy benefits to the state of Ohio.
- Innovative new economic development programming can also be integrated into the project, helping inspire and enable entrepreneurs to create reuse and remanufacturing businesses.
The Ohio Materials Marketplace helps companies access cheaper raw material feedstocks, and avoid landfill disposal fees.
- Marketplace participants benefit from significant economic savings by sourcing cheaper feedstocks from both industrial by-products and post-consumer recycled materials.
- On the flip-side, businesses using the marketplace to find outlets for their by-products and waste materials are able to avoid costly landfill tipping fees and waste hauling services.
- In the Austin Materials Marketplace, a city-scale project active since August 2014, businesses and organizations have saved and created more than $165,000.
- Many businesses participating in Materials Marketplace projects are able to generate a significant amount of revenue from recycling and reuse. General Motors, for example, has generated nearly $1 billion in annual revenue through reuse and recycling of its by-products.
Materials reuse has deep impacts through the entire value chain, including landfill diversion, energy reduction, land use impact reductions, and water use reductions.
- Materials Marketplace activities have the potential to trigger a number of key reporting indicators for your business, especially around recycled input materials, energy conservation measures, total weight diversion, and initiatives to mitigate impacts of products or services.
- At the conclusion of each transaction, the project team calculates and reports environmental impact metrics.
Leading companies and municipalities around the world are looking to reuse materials as a strategy to reduce GHG emissions.
- According to U.S. EPA, material production and use comprise 42 percent of system-wide GHG emissions in the United States. Recognizing material reuse as a carbon reduction strategy provides a great opportunity to engage businesses in value-producing circular systems and unleash tremendous creativity.
- Like other metrics, GHG reductions in the Materials Marketplace are calculated using the EPA WARM model and other LCA tools and reported back to participants at the conclusion of each transaction.
